One of the big chal­lenges of a mod­ern-day CMO is to break down walls between the dif­fer­ent silos inside the com­pa­ny and make mar­ket­ing peo­ple work with sales and PR teams. But how? They all seem to be very fond of their own lit­tle ter­ri­to­ry. And they are all “so dif­fer­ent.” Or are they? Let’s look at how mar­ket­ing and PR can work togeth­er and learn from each oth­er.

Aren’t PR And Marketing The Same Thing?

It’s a ques­tion you hear a lot: Aren’t pub­lic rela­tions and mar­ket­ing the same thing? Actu­al­ly, they aren’t, but the con­fu­sion is under­stand­able. After all, take a look at the def­i­n­i­tions:

• Mar­ket­ing: the action or busi­ness of pro­mot­ing and sell­ing prod­ucts or ser­vices, includ­ing mar­ket research and adver­tis­ing.
• Pub­lic rela­tions (PR): the prac­tice of man­ag­ing the spread of infor­ma­tion between an indi­vid­ual or an orga­ni­za­tion (such as a busi­ness, gov­ern­ment agency, or a non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tion) and the pub­lic.

If you work and think like many orga­ni­za­tions do and your mind­set is “I have a good prod­uct, I want to tell the world,” then, yes, they seem the same. In that case, after all, the goal is the same: spread­ing a mes­sage.

But if you have this way of think­ing, it also means you are only doing part of what mar­ket­ing and PR should be doing.

So how are they dif­fer­ent?

In the past, the dif­fer­ence between mar­ket­ing and PR has been quite clear, but these days the lines are blur­ring a bit. How­ev­er, you can say these ele­ments are defin­ing the dif­fer­ence between the two:

Advertising vs. “Free” Publicity

Tra­di­tion­al­ly mar­ket­ing has always been put on the adver­tis­ing side: you pay for mar­ket­ing, where­as PR is free. This means if you buy a big ad in a mag­a­zine, it’s mar­ket­ing, but if you get your CEO to be inter­viewed for the same mag­a­zine, it is PR.

Goals: Direct Value vs. Brand Value

Mar­ket­ing has a direct line with sales. When a mar­ket­ing cam­paign is start­ed, there are clear goals: In the end, we want to sell more. Even when it is not about direct sell­ing, the goals are clear: We want down­loads, we want vis­its or we want clicks.

PR, on the oth­er hand, is much more vague. It’s about brand val­ue. PR aims to make sure that the asso­ci­a­tion you have with a brand is right.

The fact that George Clooney is part of the Nespres­so cam­paigns in Europe is a clear PR strat­e­gy: It shows the brand and it will make peo­ple remem­ber the brand. We will, how­ev­er, not buy one more cup of Nespres­so cof­fee because George Clooney is there, but we will like the brand a bit more.

Controlling The Message: Get It Out There vs. Full Control

A big dif­fer­ence between mar­ket­ing and PR is how we han­dle mes­sag­ing.

Mar­keters want to get a mes­sage out there and let it “ride,” let it go viral and get input back from the audi­ence.

PR pro­fes­sion­als, on the oth­er hand, gen­er­al­ly want to have more con­trol. The word “spin” comes to mind. PR pros wants to craft a mes­sage and get that exact mes­sage placed with the exact right peo­ple, so the audi­ence will be influ­enced by it.

Measurement: Business ROI vs. No ROI

When it comes to the out­come of cam­paigns, Mar­ket­ing cam­paigns are looked at very dif­fer­ent­ly than PR cam­paigns.

Mar­ket­ing is gen­er­al­ly seen as busi­ness, which means it has direct goals in mea­sure­ments and there needs to be an ROI: i.e., new cus­tomers com­ing in.

When it comes to PR, how­ev­er, the mea­sure­ment is much more dif­fi­cult and thus, in most cas­es, they fail to put an ROI on the cam­paigns sim­ply because they can’t mea­sure it prop­er­ly. A change in per­cep­tion, after all, isn’t some­thing you can put in num­bers.

Where PR And Marketing Come Together: The Impact Of Digital

Some say PR is part of mar­ket­ing, but I wouldn’t sug­gest say­ing that to a PR per­son. They prob­a­bly won’t like you for it.

Dig­i­tal has changed how PR and mar­ket­ing are defined quite a bit, but most­ly in “who is doing what.” Out­reach used to be a PR job, but now mar­keters do out­reach as well: It start­ed off with the search mar­keters try­ing to get links and it evolved into guest post­ing and oth­er relat­ed strate­gies that are actu­al­ly a PR job, but are now most­ly done by mar­keters.

In oth­er words, PR and mar­ket­ing are relat­ed and they can work togeth­er and learn from each oth­er.

What Can PR Learn From Marketing?

The rapid­ly chang­ing dig­i­tal land­scape seems to be eas­i­er to get a grip on for mar­keters than for PR pro­fes­sion­als. This has to do with data. Where the PR professional’s job was to get a mes­sage to a jour­nal­ist, for exam­ple, who would then make sure it was “shown” to many at once, nowa­days social media has tak­en a big part of the role of the jour­nal­ist, which, in turn, means that the role of the PR pro­fes­sion­al changes.

For mar­keters, it seems to be more nat­ur­al to work with “audi­ences” because they nat­u­ral­ly are more work­ing with data. Fig­ur­ing out what an audi­ence actu­al­ly “wants” can be done using data, and mar­keters are more used to that. But it’s the oppo­site approach: where PR pro­fes­sion­als used to think from the “mes­sage” per­spec­tive, they now need to think from the “audi­ence” per­spec­tive: what do they want to hear instead of what do I want them to hear?

This is where mar­keters can help the PR depart­ment. Mea­sure, then share. Give infor­ma­tion about what is hap­pen­ing and what the audi­ence wants, based on the mar­keters’ expe­ri­ences and mea­sure­ments.

What Can Marketing Learn From PR?

One of the “hot terms” used in mar­ket­ing these days is “sto­ry­telling.” We tell the sto­ry of our com­pa­ny, we try and make a sto­ry of our prod­uct and we try to involve the audi­ence in sto­ry­telling.

Sto­ry­telling might be a “new” word in mar­ket­ing, but it actu­al­ly has been done by PR pro­fes­sion­als for ages. When Edward Bernays intro­duced “PR” as pro­pa­gan­da back in the ear­ly 20^th cen­tu­ry, he used a lot of sto­ry­telling to give peo­ple the “feel­ing” they need­ed to do some­thing.

Take one of his most famous cam­paigns, for exam­ple, in which he got many women to smoke in pub­lic. Pre­vi­ous­ly, women were arrest­ed when smok­ing in pub­lic, but he staged a “sto­ry” in which a group of mod­els lit Lucky Strike cig­a­rettes dur­ing the East­er parade in New York. He made sure the cig­a­rettes were seen as “torch­es of free­dom,” cre­at­ing a sto­ry of rebel­lion instead of an adver­tis­ing cam­paign.

This type of sto­ry­telling is in a PR professional’s DNA. They know exact­ly how to tell the sto­ry of a brand or a prod­uct. Mar­keters should lis­ten to PR pro­fes­sion­als on this. And you can see this hap­pen­ing with, for exam­ple, e‑mail sub­scribe but­tons on web­sites chang­ing from “click here” to “join a group of experts.” The entry of psy­chol­o­gy in mar­ket­ing can be (and is) fueled by PR.

Mar­keters were used to “sell­ing type” con­tent, or con­tent with a direct goal. Now, con­tent, with the rise of con­tent mar­ket­ing, is much more indi­rect.

Working together

Mar­ket­ing and PR def­i­nite­ly aren’t the same. They do, how­ev­er, serve a sim­i­lar goal. That means work­ing togeth­er will make both par­ties much stronger. It will increase the effec­tive­ness of cam­paigns with the data of the mar­keter and it will increase the per­sua­sive pow­er of the cam­paigns with the knowl­edge and tac­tics of a PR pro.

And we are see­ing the two come togeth­er with­out maybe even real­iz­ing it. Con­tent mar­ket­ing is a good exam­ple with the sto­ries that are told there. Also think about influ­ence mar­ket­ing — how is that not a great exam­ple of two worlds com­ing togeth­er? And think about Social Media in gen­er­al. This is where the mea­sure­ment can come togeth­er, because now we can mea­sure change in per­cep­tion based on how peo­ple behave on Social Media.

PR and mar­ket­ing are slow­ly grow­ing togeth­er. That doesn’t mean they are the same, but they do make each oth­er stronger.

The key is that mar­keters and PR peo­ple start work­ing on cam­paigns and projects togeth­er, from the start. The silos real­ly need to be bro­ken down. If mar­keters do what they do best and PR pro­fes­sion­als do what they do best, but they don’t com­mu­ni­cate quick­ly enough, most things will be less effec­tive. If, how­ev­er, they work togeth­er from the start, cus­tomer out­reach will sky­rock­et.